...Swathi Yadlapalli; Yukiko M. Yamashita Summary The immortal strand hypothesis proposes that stem cells retain a template copy of genomic DNA (i.e. an ‘immortal strand’) to avoid replication-induced mutations. An alternative hypothesis suggests that certain cells segregate sister chromatids non...

.... The immortal strand hypothesis proposes that stem cells reduce the accumulation of replication-induced mutations by retaining the older template DNA strands. Other models have also been proposed in which stem cells asymmetrically segregate chromosome strands for other reasons, such as retention of epigenetic...